Nanostructures may have applications in many fields, including industrial, medical, imaging, electronics, and magnetics. Nanostructures may take on any variety of shapes and sizes and may be formed from one or more materials.
One such nanostructure is a gold nanorod (GNR). GNRs demonstrate potential in a broad range of applications ranging from medicine and pharmacology to renewable energy and catalysis, often in composite materials or as parts of more complex molecular systems. Current efforts in research and development of GNRs are limited, however, by inefficient and laborious synthetic procedures. Current methods employed produce GNR solutions in small, polydisperse volumes and require a considerable amount of time to produce a suitable amount for production. Commonly used methods for producing GNRs also have an unacceptably low yield by mass, utilizing only approximately 29% of the gold precursor. These limitations have caused production of GNRs to be cost and time prohibitive.
Accordingly, a need exists for a method of making GNRs that addresses the cost and time prohibitive characteristics of conventional methods.